I am a novelist and screenwriter. New novel 'Good Girls Don't Die' out now!

Out Of Sight

My novel Out of Sight, first published in September 2011 by Quercus, is both psychological suspense and a love story.
I wanted to write about emotional cowardice, about what originally provokes it, its effect on other people, and, above all, the psychological mechanisms that allow a damaged man such as my ‘hero’ Patrick Hinde to go on repeating his self-destructive behaviour.
I am interested in how we all to some extent shut out feelings we find unbearable, and wanted to explore the kind of forgetting involved in such avoidant, compartmentalized thinking.
When I came across two strikingly similar tragic incidents that occurred in France within a week of one another in 2008, I knew I had my story.
It was sometimes hard to write, as I felt a great responsibility towards the people to whom these events have happened, but they perfectly dramatise the kind of forgetting I wanted to explore.
In real life, the fatal absence of mind probably stems more from too great a focus on everyday routines and concerns. In the novel, Patrick’s failure of memory, which causes the death of his much-loved little son, Daniel, is a learned coping strategy.
The love story follows the novel’s other main character, Leonie Treadwell. She meets Patrick in France five years after the tragedy, falls deeply in love, and refuses to give up on her belief that love will heal his damage.